In any case the m3u file contained lots of links to IPTV stations that were no longer available of not responding anymore so I wrote an awk script to parse the m3u and based on an expression execute and action that was a system() call. AWK is a great tool to use search expressions and logic on records in files but is a PITA to debug – and my other attempts at using getline didnt help either. M3U files are a sequence of paired records which makes grep and shell scripting innappropriate I think (which I did try firstly) and awk seems a better way, even if it needs a bunch of calls out to another process/shell.